At the present time, procedures in various medical areas such as radiology and orthopedics, require physicians to place their hands near or even in a fluoroscopic field. These procedures are relatively new and provide improved patient care, less traumatic operations and shortened recovery periods Such procedures include percutaneous kidney stone removal or percutaneous biliary shunt placement, both of which has virtually replaced open surgical procedures and are performed by radiologists. In orthopedics, blind nailing of bones such as the femur are also much less invasive and are increasingly replacing open surgical procedures In all of these procedures, however, the physician is required to work for prolonged periods of time under fluoroscopic guidance with the physician's hands near or in the fluoroscopic field. An active physician performing these type of procedures will rapidly accumulate high doses of ionizing radiation to the hands, often well above the limits allowed The International Council for Radiation Protection currently recommends a dose limit of not more than 50 rems/year to the hands. During certain non-vascular procedures, exposure to the hands has been shown to be about 33 times more than the dose received at the physician's face.
Thus, there is a present need for providing a surgical glove having good tactile sense in order to permit the physician to perform the procedures involved and that the glove provide fully effective hand protection to the physician against exposure to X-rays. That is, the glove must have an X-ray absorbing composition uniformly distributed throughout the glove and be free of pin holes. Presently, there are available lead oxide loaded gloves produced from polyurethane or polyvinylchloride. Unfortunately, these gloves lack the tactile sense needed for surgical use since they are essentially non-stretchable due to the nature of polyurethane or other material compared with natural latex rubber, and this is exacerbated by the heavy loading with lead oxide. Examples of such gloves are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,025,403; 3,045,121; 3,185,751 and 3,883,749. None of these patents discloses a means for preparing gloves from natural latex which are free of pinholes. In addition, the prior art gloves are relatively ineffectual for attenuating X-rays. For example, in the ranges normally used, e.g., 80-100 kilovolts, these gloves absorb only about 20% of the incident radiation. These gloves also share the common drawback in that their production is dangerous since lead oxide is toxic. Accordingly, it would be highly desirable to provide a glove having a tactile sense which permits their use in surgery as well as a glove capable of attenuating substantially greater amounts of incident radiation as compared to presently available gloves. It would be highly desirable to provide an X-ray absorbing glove from natural latex since gloves produced from latex are highly stretchable. However, there is no presently available process for producing high particle density loaded latex gloves which avoids latex coagulation and/or air entrapment while maintaining a homogeneous latex mix. Thus, there is no presently available method for making thin loaded latex gloves free of pin holes.